The paper is actually two bits of empirical work brought
(smashed?) together. The argument is:

British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) data demonstrates
alarming opposition to new housing

This opposition tends to be in suburban, or non-remote rural
locations, the sorts of places stuffed full of middle-class community activists

The only thing that would really overcome this argument is
if the development offered more local employment, which housing developments
very rarely do

The logic implicit in neighbourhood planning and the
associated financial incentives is that this opposition is driven by peoples’
opposition to costs that affect them individually

Actually, we argue that the opposition is driven by the
threat to peoples’ identity as it is expressed through their housing choices
and sense of home.

The two bits of work were actually done separately. Prof.
Bramley had done the analysis of the BSAS data, including modelling at a local
level. I’d started to think about the other theoretical analysis. We realised
we could bring the two bits of empirical analysis together for this paper.

The trouble is, the paper is based on 2010 BSAS data. Since
then, the 2013 BSAS data on attitudes to new housing have
been published (pdf) and it shows a bit of a different story. The extremely
good news is opposition has dropped from 46% to 31% and support grown from 28
to 47%. Now, if I were Eric Pickles I’d be thinking “woo, neighbourhood
planning has worked! Everyone wants new housing!”.

However, I’d suggest that, as I
argued a couple of years ago, the problems of never-ending house price
rises and the growth of the incredibly poor quality private rented sector,
means housing is becoming a middle-class issue and rising up the political
agenda as little Sebastian or Tabatha struggle to get a decent home on a professional salary. And we all know that these housing problems are a combination of: a
lack of regional planning, meaning the market focuses growth in London and the
Southeast; low interest rates and thus the low cost of mortgages and increase
in effective demand for housing; as Danny Dorling has argued, the lack of
housing supply due to under-occupancy in the owner-occupied sector by older
people (my mum in her four-bedroomed house); and a lack of new building.

A couple of the findings of the latest BSAS data do continue
to support our thesis. Opposition among homeowners to new housing is still far
higher than for renters in either private or social sectors. These are the
people we suggest would have most to lose if their sense of elective/selective
belonging – their identity – was threatened by 200 Barratt/Bellway boxes
turning up on their doorstep. Also, although overall opposition in the highest
income decile fell from 49% to 33%, supporting my housing-as-a-middle-class-problem
thesis, it remained high, at around a third, in the places we’d expect –
suburbs and non-remote towns.

Rather interestingly, this time around BSAS asked questions
directly about the so-called “Boles
bung”; or to be precise they were asked if they would support new housing
if extra money was provided for local public services. Again, I’d argue, the
results support our thesis: 47% said it would make them support; 50% said it
wouldn’t. If homeowners were homo
economicus, making rational decisions based on the immediate costs we’d
expect to see much greater support if local public services were improved.
These results suggest a much more pyscho-social homo democratus is at work here, positioning themselves in society
with their residential choices and having and internal and external debate
about anything that would affect this.

Friday, 22 August 2014

Writing this I’m thinking “if my A Level Sociology teachers
could see me now”. I studied sociology in school but really didn’t think I’d
return to it, but now it seems a lot of my academic output wrestles with social
theory.

Essentially the paper riffs from one of the four
causal theories we identified in our overall review and published in our
paper for Social
Policy and Administration.* This was that the alignment between the
cultural capital of service users and service providers means that middle class
people benefit disproportionately from the state. We return to a richer
discussion of how Bourdieu conceived of class interests and how they operate in
society and then bring the range of evidence we review to this theoretical structure
to demonstrate it in action.

The title including the words “The Big Society” might seem a
bit odd or dated, but essentially this was just a policy to hang our ideas off
and give the paper salience. However, what did interest us was the continued move
towards local empowerment in policy, as implemented in Big Society ideas and
practically in localism and the Localism Act in England, without concomitant
investment in community development, might lead to greater empowerment of
middle class groups. The evidence we reviewed showed pretty conclusively that
it is very likely it will.

I remember just at the time we were going to submit the
paper a conversation on Twitter along the lines of “does anyone even talk about
the Big Society anymore”. And it is a very good point. After the umpteenth
relaunch failed the government stopped talking about the Big Society and now
the policy is increasingly mired in scandal.

However, as you’ll see from the reference list, for once,
when the coalition government, with its commitment to localism and the Big
Society, academia actually did quite well at getting a swift response out to
these policy moves. I think partly because there was a lot of stuff in the
pipeline about former community policies by the Labour government which could
easily be changed, but also because community engagement and participation had
become such a substantial area of research in the UK, people were ready to step
up to the mark fairly swiftly and offer strong theoretical and
evidence-informed critique.

Further, I think that the Big Society and the associated
localism policies caused such an immediate response because at its kernel there
is a lot of interesting stuff to get at. The most shallow level of analysis
would suggest that it uncomfortably combines a one-nation Tory belief in the
power of civic society in the tradition of the Primrose League and
Rotary Societies, and a more Thatcherite, neoliberal redistribution of
responsibility and risk to individuals, albeit recognising they are in
communities. Because of the coalition it also brings in a liberal attitude to
government more generally. Much as the label “the Big Society” has died a
death, it’s a good metonym for all of this sort of stuff, including policies
such as the Scottish Government’s Community Empowerment and Renewal agenda
(which I discussed in relation to this research back here).

Further, and this is the crux of our argument in our paper,
there is the very real and present danger that community empowerment
initiatives just empower the vociferous middle classes. As many of the
critiques of the government policy highlight, this is particularly the case in
our current period of austerity when, apart from the community organisers
programme, very little investment in community engagement is going into the
most deprived neighbourhoods. It is an example of middle-class norms dominating
policy-making to the benefit of the middle-classes themselves; the middle-class
state.

We believe that using a Bourdieusian understanding of social
class adds to our understanding of policy-making and the unequal operation of
the state. Hopefully our paper will lead to a broader research agenda along
these lines, moving beyond education policy, the traditional focus of
Bourdieusian analysis.

*as ever, most journal articles by me available
in my institutional repository here though in
this case you’ll have to wait a year. Do email me if you want a copy though.

Tuesday, 12 August 2014

My first book chapter is coming out soonly. It’s entitled Time, belonging and development – a
challenge for participation and research and is part of a collection edited
by Nick Gallent and Daniela Ciaffi called Community
Planning and Action published by Policy Press.

I was honoured to be asked to offer the chapter by Nick and
Daniela. My chapter is one of the front three theoretical thinkpiece chapters
and I’m in illustrious company with Nick and Daniela and Yvonne Rydin. The
chapter was my first book chapter and I relished the opportunity to do a bit
more “blue-skies” thinking and theoretical work in my writing. However, at the
start I was slightly paralysed by fear. Some of the book chapters of this ilk I
have read and have been some of the most inspiring and influential writing for
me – was I up to the job? I’d also only really written my thesis and many
journal articles in my academic career. At this time I was particularly into
the swing of journal article writing and this style of writing is very
different indeed. Luckily Pat Thomson came to the rescue after a plea from me
with this very
useful blog post that enabled me to frame my chapter as a contribution to a
“topic based edited collections”.

The chapter itself moves some of the theoretical work I
started doing in my Very
Difficult Theory Paper forward. Essentially I play around with the temporal
points I was making in that paper – that much as moments of community planning and
engagement can be highly antagonist it seems, from my empirical work, that over
the longer term debate tends towards Habermasian communicative norms,
particularly in land-use planning because the tangibility of the outputs means
they become part of the discourse itself; literally buildings speak. They are
also imbued with meaning. This is theoretical work I’d like to take further
considering the listing of modernist buildings and the controversies around
this, but also the meaning-full-ness (I’m using wanky po-mo construction there
deliberately, forgive me) of demolition.

(There’s also some interesting arts stuff here about “invitations”
to participate and participation on a spectrum from witnessing to engagement
which I learnt about yesterday, but that I’m still processing that I want to
bring into this theoretical debate…)

Of particular interest in writing the chapter, and something
I am definitely going to take further, was the idea of critical temporalities,
which I got from Michelle Bastian’s fantastic Temporal Belonging project and
the outputs of the Power, Time
and Agency workshop. This is basically the idea that our sense of time –
our temporalities – are highly varied, subjective, and unequal and created by
power structures in wider society. These power structures can be conceived in
Foucauldian or structuralist ways. If you go back to the old title of this blog
– Urbanity and History – this focus on the nuances and experiences of time
greatly appeals to me.

A final note of thanks has to go to Nick Gallent, the
editor. He was enormously helpful in providing ample and extremely useful
critical feedback on drafts of the chapter and has helped make it something
that when I go back to look at it again, as I did when I was reviewing the
proofs, I actually thought “hang on, this isn’t too bad at all.”

So, if you’re interested in purchasing the book – the other
chapters are excellent as well – if you download this
flyer you can get a substantial discount. Once I know the rules (i.e.
whether I can) I’ll pop a pre-print version on my page of the
Stirling institutional repository as well.Now I just have to crack on and edit my first book with Dr Dave O'Brien. With Nick's example, this will be a very tall order to follow!

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.